Mustn’t grumble
They say a week is a long time in politics. Well, it has certainly felt like a long time in the education policy landscape, not least with an attempt by the new government to get an early grip on the curriculum.
Perhaps it’s the speed with which the curriculum review panel has been put into place, but social media was relatively quiet on the matter. I only saw some very moderate grumbling about the lack of representation from this or that part of the sector.
At the risk of grumbling from the sidelines myself, the absence of anyone with any apparent working knowledge of alternative provision seems like a missed opportunity – not least because of our increasingly important role amid rising exclusions from mainstream schools.
However, I am genuinely pleased by the experience and quality of the panel, so I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Lessons learned
After all, those who loudly voiced their concern when Dame Christine Gilbert was named to head the independent review of Ofsted’s part in the Ruth Perry tragedy had all their concerns roundly proven to be unjustified this week. Gilbert hasn’t held anything back.
Not that you’d know Ofsted has anything to learn at all if all you read was Amanda Spielman’s interview in these pages last week. Retired teacher trainer Jan Rowe captured edu-Twitter’s response to that most succinctly (and politely).
And she was confirmed in her view very quickly, also in Schools Week.
The most significant sentence from Gilbert’s review for me reads as follows: “It is important that inspectors (and all staff up to and including HMCI) are never placed beyond human fallibility.”
As the stakes of receiving a ‘poor’ outcome have increased, so the concept that Ofsted just might have got it wrong has disappeared. This approach must change.
And change is afoot, as Ofsted’s response to its Big Listen consultation was also published this week.
Of the immediate changes announced, the most impactful may turn out to be moving all ‘the calls’ to Mondays. It’s a simple way to immediately reduce that horrible and familiar gut clench when the phone rings between Monday mid morning until Wednesday mid afternoon, but the longer-term ambition has to be that inspection doesn’t lead to those feelings at all.
How to get a head
Which would be a big help with headteacher recruitment and retention. But while rebalancing accountability is part of the equation, it isn’t the whole solution, as this blog by headteacher Simon Botten articulates well.
Here, Botten sets out why headship has been the pinnacle of his career (and still is), explores why that may well not be the case anymore for most, and warns that this might backfire for well-meaning school improvers.
The blog contains a number of valid points about why there is a headteacher recruitment crisis, not least the availability of exciting trust-wide roles with important-sounding titles like director and salaries to match.
I am even longer in the tooth than Botten, who has been a head for 18 years. Sadly, (and he does acknowledge this), ‘twas ever thus’. The ambition just used to be for local authority roles.
I don’t think ambition is our problem, but I do agree with Botten’s concluding message that we need to make headteachering great again. That means trying to ensure the pull factors of the job outweigh the push of toxic accountability as well as the pull of other opportunities.
Social media detox
One thing I have been able to detoxify in readiness for this term has been my social media feed, which I’ve done by switching my attention from X-Twitter to BlueSky. There, my timeline has been filled with positivity by the advent of the annual researchED national conference.
Brilliant people like Professor Rob Coe have been sharing a vast array of resources.
While others have just been having a good time with their peers and colleagues.
I’m sure there are people grumbling about all this somewhere, but I’m no longer listening.
Lesson learned.
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